St. Cyricus Island

Worth a detour

The island immediately off the old town was where the temple of Apollo and the thirteen-metre bronze stood. Later it took the Bulgarian fishermen's school, then sixty years as a naval base, and it is still not open. A breakwater built in the 1920s joins it to the peninsula, so you can walk to the barrier and look; that, for now, is all.

Story

Background

The French consul Alexandre Degrand dug here in 1904 and found the foundations of three temples, a monumental altar, a cistern and East Greek and Attic pottery of the seventh to second centuries BC. Excavation resumed in 2009 and added a three-apsed basilica of the later fourth century AD with dozens of graves of the fifth to seventh centuries around it. The island is about eight and a quarter hectares.

Its modern history is odd. A law of 1924 and a decree signed by Tsar Boris III created a fishermen's school here; the building went up to a design by Stoyan Nikolov, and the first class began in October 1930. The poet Nikola Vaptsarov was among its students that year. A breakwater two hundred and fifty metres long was built in 1926 and 1927 to connect the island to the town. From 1945 to 2005 the whole place was a naval base and nobody civilian set foot on it.

Since then it has been argued over rather than opened. Ownership was transferred to the state port company in January 2026 and the decision reversed in April, returning it to the Ministry of Culture; renovation work started in late 2025. The lighthouse does not work and the buildings are in poor condition. Do not plan a visit — walk out along the breakwater from the marina as far as you are allowed, look at the shape of the thing, and read the rest in the Archaeological Museum.